In Which We Find You Something To Read This Summer

Summer Reading

by JANE HU

This is the first in a series.

Middlemarch by George Eliot

I know. You're thinking, "Duh." I know. But I had not read Middlemarch until this summer. It always loomed before me in its sheer and sprawling magnitude, which is also what makes it the paradigmatic summer read. Dorothea Brooke quickly becomes a commonplace in any book-nerd’s vocabulary, but she’s not by any means the only actor in Eliot’s novel. There's Tertius Lydgate — the over-ambitious doctor whose dreams begin to unravel, rather tragically, from the start — and Casaubon, who, presented before any romantic girl, should invoke all the important questions (“How very ugly Mr. Casaubon is!”; “Mr. Casaubon is so sallow”; “Has Mr. Casaubon a great soul?”). Even small characters round out, if only due to the imaginative range inspired by Eliot’s sympathetic eye. Not only witty and intelligent, Eliot is endlessly mature in her insights. The sentences that make Middlemarch a page-turner are also nuggets of enlightened gold.

A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh

Waugh came to resent the fact that Brideshead Revisted was his most celebrated book. The lush sentimentality of Brideshead makes it the novel most unlike his others. Nearly two decades after its publication, Waugh would do, perhaps, what he does best: satirize the extravagant manor drama in the conclusion to his war trilogy, Sword of Honour.

The savage ironist comes out with both pistols cocked in A Handful of Dust. Tony and Brenda are married, but that doesn’t stop Brenda from her affair with John Beaver. Lies accumulate and both sides seem to know the score, but that doesn’t stop them from keeping up all pretenses to sincerity. There will be jokes you’ll want to retell your friends — jokes that will make you (I swear!) LOL — but these won’t translate well out of context. They’ll just have to read the whole damn thing themselves. 

The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen

Incidentally, Tessa Hadley recently recommended this novel on her list, Five Best Books: Betrayals of Love. One would be remiss not to agree with Hadley: The Heat of the Day is most strikingly a love story. But it is also a postwar narrative, stitched with the precarious threads of paranoia, espionage, interrogation, and, yes, finally betrayal. Bowen places her characters amid the foggy hours of summer’s dusk, where a step toward the bar means to risk confessing — or leaking — too much information.

As heroine of this detective tale, Stella Rodney exemplifies the double agent: torn between Nazi spy Robert Kelway and his pursuant, the counter-espionage agent Robert Harrison. Bowen’s choice of names does not, of course, result from carelessness. The entire novel rivets the reader with twisting wordplay that makes the text itself into a document to be scanned with scrutinizing care.

Less than Angels by Barbara Pym

There are a lot of modernist lady writers who have unjustly fallen out of vogue, print, and the ever-contemporizing discourse on the canon (which says, really, so much about the canon). It’s not just that a lot of intelligent texts penned by women have been prematurely left behind, but also that so much delightfully entertaining literature has been kept from our hungry eyes.  

Less than Angels is an academic satire on a group of anthropologists at the African Institute in London and it is better written, smarter, and sharper than that other one (Lucky Jim). If writing today, Pym might disseminate some sassy social commentary on a blog that would, each time, tap into a cultural tic. It’s not too late, though, to read her now. 

The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan

The Comfort of Strangers is a slim book, but that’s not the reason anyone reads something ten times. No matter how familiar, McEwan’s sentences keep on giving. Each time you return to Mary and Colin lounging in their Venetian hotel, you’ll be charged with a greater sense of uncertainty and anticipation despite how — or more likely because — you know the ending. He’s a writer who can do that. Every new detail will slice deeper as the prelude to an impending break from innocence.

Taking directly from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, McEwan lures his lovers into the same labyrinthine city and subjects them to an infusion of pornography, sex, and carnality that, at times, resembles a Lynchian daydream. A heat emanates from the novel — interwoven with a blur of white linen — that might make your beach experience seem relatively cooler. 

Girl With Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace

“Everything is Green” — a short (short!) story in the collection titled above — was the first thing I ever read by Wallace. It is also my favorite thing by him. Those 700 or so words are like panacea for the heart. They will make you feel things you thought your ironic, discerning, postmodern non-self no longer had the fragility to feel. Those last three sentences will knock you about a bit and leave you searching for those lost pieces that will help recall your vulnerability again. Wallace is at his best when he intimates that love still has the capacity to make one culpable — for potentially anything or anyone — in this world.

Aside from “Everything is Green,” the other stories are punctuated with subtitles or historical quotes from magazines that make them perfect for reading in transit. Once, immersed in “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way” (the longest of them all), I started riding the same line back and forth, end to end, in order to finish it. I probably should have just gotten off, but Wallace’s words are terribly conducive to motion. Sentences like “The lover tries to traverse: there is motion of travel, except no travel,” while seductively ambiguous, are also profoundly tender. In "Little Expressionless Animals,” Alex Trebek asks, "Is there such a thing as an intellectual caress?" Yes! Certainly! But, don’t forget, Wallace goes far beyond the head. A Wallace’s sentence is perpetually "giving up its shape in a gesture that expresses that shape. See?" So that content— thought — becomes also a gesture, a caress. 

Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon

Wonder Boys might be the darker companion piece to Out of Sheer Rage on this list. Both narrators seek to complete their magnum opuses. Both recognize, rather openly, how this more or less won’t happen. Both continue onwards with the task. It is this persistent faith — overpowering all futility and shame — which makes Chabon’s protagonist and Dyer’s narrator both so exasperatingly sympathetic.

Like Dyer’s book, Wonder Boys is madly playful, but Chabon makes his protagonist even more self-willed in his delusions that, because we grudgingly care about him, it often hurts. Grady Tripp embodies the despondent professor and fading author as he blunders through Chabon’s campus novel, besieged by his own self-contradictions. At first I think I hate him, but then he opens his mouth and says something beautiful. 

Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence by Geoff Dyer

Dyer’s pseudo-memoir begins with aims to tackle an academic book on D. H. Lawrence, and amounts to a 232 page first-person narration of this maddening tussle. While Lawrence’s name appears on nearly each page, the novel is only tangentially about the author. Dyer is too distracted and restless to get down to the task of writing, so he goes travelling instead, bounding back and forth between London, Rome, Paris, Greece…unable to settle anywhere for long since stillness immediately brings only dissatisfaction. We follow the breathless pace of his mental and physical journey (where not much, honestly, happens) eagerly. The book is a viciously funny monologue — a couple hundred pages of exquisitely readable whining. It’s also a travelogue, punctuated by rather stunning philosophical insight and sometimes, goodness forbid, even literary criticism.

At one point, Dyer questions the novelistic form, as he yearns for something more compatible with lived experience: notes, letters, thoughts that exemplify the act of becoming rather than retrospectively pieced-together states of being. His phrases reenact the errant (and frequently banal) movements of self-destructive behavior in ways that are therapeutic to the reader and, presumably, also writer. He wishes the book to be “not a history of how I recovered from a breakdown but of how breaking down became a means of continuing.” It’s not merely “look-no-hands” prose, for we actually believe Dyer in his aimless, sometimes careless, search for faith from unexpected sources. Finally, you will laugh.

The Giant, O'Brien by Hilary Mantel

Are you fascinated with lists? Tabulations? Catalogues? Collectors? Hunters? Binomial nomenclature? Language systems? Historical fiction set in the 18th century London (but written in the 1990s)? Enlightenment ideals? Giants? Freaks? Monsters? Frankenstein? Diseases? Bodies? Animal fables? Sapient pigs? The distinctions between moral pain, physical pain, and emotional pain? The very history of pain? The incommunicability of pain? Regarding the pain of others? Allusions? Expostulations on print capitalism and commodity culture? Ireland? Or perhaps Scotland? Medicine? Experiments? Surgery? Corpses? Crimes? Bioethics? Torture? Cruelty? Sex? Science? Wonder? Magic? Cures? The afterlife of pain? The afterlife itself? Whichever way you spin it, Mantel’s stories nearly recommend themselves. The novel stitches together the narratives of the eponymous Giant and a scientist-of-questionable-ethics John Hunter. It will be unlike anything you have ever encountered. 

The Complete Letters of Henry James: Vol 1 & 2

James wrote a lot of beautiful novels, but most of them might stand to be too meandering in their verbosity and too static in their action to amount to any riotous summer reading. Letters are my answer to bite-sized James without being sacrilegious (anyway, it’s rather unimaginable that anyone might abridge him). James wrote a lot of beautiful novels because, well, everything that man touched turned to crystal-refracted insight, so you can damn well bet that the letters are better prose than most could ever dream up, given infinite time, a keyboard, and a backspace. “There’s no telling where my pen may take me,” he muses to his mother in 1869.

Describing the American individual, James writes, “There is but one word to use in regard to them — vulgar, vulgar, vulgar. Their ignorance — their stingy, defiant grudging attitude towards everything European— their perpetual reference of all things to some American standard or precedent which exists only in their own unscrupulous wind-bags—and then our unhappy poverty of voice, of speech and of physiognomy—these things glare at you hideously.” (Other times he checks himself: “But I must stay my gossiping hand. . . .”) But James was a grand American—the best kind there is; the type that leaves America for some time. Frequently, James would sign off: “Thy lone and loving exile.” Beyond all this, his correspondences offer a counterpoint to James as the mythic man of studious seclusion, where one can experience — almost unmediated — the reeling joy, the vitalizing discernment, that is so crucially tied to his genius. 

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

For many, the defining feature of Netherland is its status as a post-9/11 novel. Others emphatically describe it as first and foremost a postcolonial re-writing of The Great Gatsby. It’s also a detective story set in the dazed summer months. Hans van der Broek — Dutch-born American immigrant — is left in New York by his London-bound wife and son. He subsequently befriends Chuck Ramkissoon, an American dreamer from Trinidad. However you read it, Netherland is politically thoughtful, while also rhetorically sensitive and stunning.

O’Neill handles Hans’s ethical impasses (no matter how confusedly they compound) with quiet sympathy, and treats cricket as the moral barometer that might finally redeem us. If so many “readable” novels don’t leave enough breathing space to let you simply think, then Netherland is an exception: “I was bowled over. I had never considered the possibility of undiscovered factors.” What the novel says is underpinned with the swiftest strokes of intelligence — a plurality of “factors.” Yet, how it is said never fails to move on an individual level. Be careful. You might end up feeling the right emotions for the wrong reasons. 

Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

In the fall of third year, I took to putting those accumulating New Yorkers to use and began toting them to the gym. I’d ride the elliptical and read until either the machine or the small print wore me out. I’d stumble along the treadmill while quietly mouthing Sam Shephard’s dialogue. It was through this routine that I discovered Moore’s story "Childcare", which had, by the time of my reading it, been expanded into a novel, The Gate at the Stairs. This I would not have promptly registered had I not been so enraptured with Moore’s protagonist, Tassie Keltjin, as to Google her. Needless to say, the novel was bought. It’s a Chekhovian bildungsroman set in the American Midwest — this generation’s version of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn for small town 20-somethings.

Full of lyrical turns and natural imagery, The Gate at the Stairs is compelling even when depicting the most quotidian phenomena. Tassie goes to college and babysits a recently adopted mixed-race baby. She falls in love, sort of. She grows up. Sort of. The most common criticism of Moore’s novel is that Tassie sounds wildly wise beyond her years — her voice is too witty, too mature, too world-weary. But, I’m thinking, “Nah, girls are sad when they’re twenty. They frequently long to feel heavy. At least I did.” For me, Moore got Tassie right.

Jane Hu is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer currently based in Berlin. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about her favorite novels.

"Slow Motion" - Patrick Wolf (mp3)

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More Books To Fill Your Idle Time

Part One (Tess Lynch, Karina Wolf, Elizabeth Gumport, Sarah LaBrie, Isaac Scarborough, Daniel D'Addario, Lydia Brotherton, Brian DeLeeuw)

Part Two (Alice Gregory, Jason Zuzga, Andrew Zornoza, Morgan Clendaniel, Jane Hu, Ben Yaster, Barbara Galletly, Elena Schilder, Almie Rose)

Part Three (Alexis Okeowo, Benjamin Hale, Robert Rutherford, Kara VanderBijl, Damian Weber, Jessica Ferri, Britt Julious, Letizia Rossi, Will Hubbard, Durga Chew-Bose, Rachel Syme, Amanda McCleod, Yvonne Georgina Puig)

In Which Elizabeth Bowen Lives In Windowless Rooms

Don't Bat An Eyelid

by JANE HU

I bussed down to New York City this past week in hopes of extracting some form of a mini-break before the start of school. The city posed as a welcome escape from my summer of windowless offices and libraries, where I scoured databases and watched films in unventilated screening rooms. On the ride over, between fantasizing about the parks I would breeze around, I sent my professor an e-mail: "I just wanted to let you know I'm in NYC for this week. If there's anything I can do here in relation to Bowen, etc. let me know!"

I am writing my thesis on Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen and, wherever I go, she always haunts the back of my mind. Incidentally, there were manuscripts to be found at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, which was precisely where I spent the majority of my mini-break.

A lover of archives, I was seven when I received my first diary and have kept one ever since. I recall years when I wouldn’t sleep without logging an entry — the day could only end after my written acknowledgement. Past my bedtime, crouched under the covers, I would blindly scrawl out notes of apparent insignificance. "My piano test is over and I’m very happy." "I just came home from Bingo! Tonight I did not win anything but oh well." "Something is wrong with my watch." I’ve always believed in documenting life and perhaps Bowen said it best: "Those without memories don’t know what is what."

Born 1899 in Dublin, Bowen spent the first seven years of her life migrating between Bowen’s Court, her large family house in County Cork, and her home in Dublin. Growing up, the Bowens kept a close eye on Elizabeth’s development: she was never to drink too much milk; she was always to wear gloves to avoid freckling. Elizabeth was also not allowed to learn to read until she was seven since it was common knowledge that Bowen’s overworked their brains. Part of this may have held some truth for her father, a lawyer, suffered a mental breakdown from which he never recovered. Elizabeth was around five when he took for the worse, yet she arose nearly unscathed: "I had come out of the tension and mystery of my father’s illness, the apprehensive silence or chaotic shoutings... with nothing more disastrous than a stammer." Perhaps it was this stammer that contributed to Bowen’s inimitable style — a use of inverted syntax that never includes a single unnecessary word.

Bowen's densely psychological narratives carried the sensibilities of nineteenth-century realism into modernism, where her twisted sentences emphasized the uncanny aspects of daily existence. My favorite prose of hers is found in her 1935 novel The House in Paris, where Karen delivers an internal monologue on her already thwarted future. Bowen exposes Karen’s conceptual twists of time and memory in labyrinthine sentences that you cannot help but indulge in:

These hours are only hours. They cannot be again, but no hours can. Hours in a room with a lamp and a tree outside, with tomorrow eating into them. The grass sprang up when we took our hands away. The maid will make this bed and fold back two corners of eiderdown like they were folded back when I put my hat on it.... I cannot see him to see what a child would be like. Though there will not be a child, that is why I want to see him. If a child were going to be born, there would still be something that had to be. Tonight would be more then than hours and that lamp. It would have been the hour of my death. I should have to do what I dread, see them know. There would still be something to dread. I should see the hour in the child. I should not have rushed on to nothing. He would be the mark our hands did not leave on the grass, he would be the tamarisks we only half saw. And he would be the I whose bed Naomi sat on, the Max whose sleeve I brushed rain off: tender and guardable.

Following Henry James, whom she frequently emulated, Bowen believed in "the treatment of an incident, crisis, or, situation which the writer feels to be of greater importance than its apparent triviality might show." Because she valued tradition and good manners, readers often judge her as a snobbish conservative. These critics miss Bowen’s acute sense of empathy, which evince her open progressiveness. On the declining institution of the Irish manor, she reveals her social intuition:

Or is it the fear that, if one goes into the big house, one will have to be ‘polite’? Well, why not be polite—are not humane manners the crown of being human at all? Politeness is not constriction; it is a grace: it is really no worse than an exercise of the imagination on other people’s behalf. And are we to cut grace quite out of life?

If you’ve heard Bowen’s name, it was most likely from an encounter with her 1938 novel The Death of the Heart  or 1949's The Heat of the Day. Both energetically plotted and cohesive narratives, these two works have grown to become her most well known. In the latter, Bowen registers the violent shifts experienced in the two world wars, the Troubles, and the Irish Civil War. Her war fiction portrays sleepwalkers who, although not dead, were neither fully alive. Aside from her novels, which are read less than they should, Bowen is also one of the most underrated short story writers of this century. Whereas longer narratives allow for full-length character development, Bowen used the compressed quality of short fiction to create more fantastical and metonymic worlds. Her prominent ability to create an atmosphere of tension and tautness cuts most clearly in the shorter works. Here, the quiet ghosts and haunted figures of her novels emerge as full-blown, speaking phantoms.

All romantic notions aside, Bowen viewed herself as a professional writer who worked steadily at her desk throughout the day. On top of writing fiction, which Bowen equated to living life, she also published numerous essays and articles. Responsible for both her London house in Regent’s Park and the inherited Bowen’s Court, Bowen needed her writing to earn a profit.

bowen's court

By the late 1930s, Bowen had reached an international reputation that continued to grow into the 1940s. Although her essays produced a significant amount of her income, Bowen nonetheless felt her journalism as subordinate to her fiction. Even late in life, she rejected her status as a critic: "I do not really consider myself a critic – I do not think, really, that a novelist should be a critic; but, by some sort of irresistible force, criticism seems to come almost every novelist’s way. I write, at intervals, for The New Statesman, The Listener, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar; and do request articles, from time to time, for papers too diverse to enumerate."

Since her death in 1973, interest and scholarship in Bowen has waned, although there seems to have been a revival this past decade. Victoria Glendinning’s foreword to her excellent biography on Bowen properly states, "She is to be spoken of in the same breath as Virginia Woolf, on whom much more breath has been expended." Glendinning goes on to acknowledge that Bowen is what came after Bloomsbury. "She is the link which connects Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark."

My first Bowen novel was The Death of the Heart, where I met the intelligent orphan Portia in all her sixteen years of bright innocence. Nineteen myself at the time, I encountered Portia’s utter artlessness with uncomfortable familiarity. Having already fallen for the female protagonists of Edith Wharton and Henry James, who, for me, exemplified heartbreaking innocence, it was clear that Portia belonged to the same breath as Daisy Miller, Isabel Archer, and Lily Bart. Portia was fragile and stubborn, hopeful and despairing, curious while asking all the wrong questions. Similar to how I felt at sixteen, Portia was full of an unself-awareness that simultaneously melted with her own self-importance. So overwhelmingly innocent, she could not perceive the mess she made for those around her.

Portia keeps a saccharine diary that gets covertly passed between adults and which consequently lands under the reader’s eyes too. I cringed through each of these entries in a way that only happens when one encounters oneself caught off-guard; I might have been rereading my own not-so-distant maudlin thoughts. Portia is mistakenly — but predictably — in love with a cad named Eddie and she writes, “He says he had lunch with Anna and that she was nice. He says he did think of ringing me up, but he did not. He does not say why. He says he feels he is starting a new life.” And like many young girls, Portia finds sweetness in the mundane:

After supper, I sat on our rug in front of Thomas’ fire. I thought some of the things that Eddie had told me on this rug.
His father is a builder.
When he was a child he knew pieces of the Bible straight off by heart.
He is quite afraid of the dark.
His two favourite foods are cheese straws and jellied consommé.  
He would not really like to be very rich.
He says that when you love someone all your saved-up wishes start coming out.
He does not like being laughed at, so he pretends he wants people to laugh at him.
He has thirty-six ties.

Although she goes on painfully for pages about the undeserving Eddie, Portia’s diary reveals glimpses of the discerning woman she will become: "Thomas said he did not know what had put this into his head and after that he gave me a sort of look when he did not think I was looking."

In A.S. Byatt’s introduction to The House in Paris, she asserts "that Elizabeth Bowen has got Henrietta right. Adult readers are given to saying, of children like Henrietta, that ‘real’ children are not so sophisticated, so articulate, so thoughtful. What I remember with absolute clarity from this reading was a feeling that the private analyses I made to myself of things were vindicated, the confusions I was aware of were real, and presumably important and interesting, since here they were described." Bowen’s words reassured me that a sixteen year-old girl’s perspective and opinions mattered. While her fiction was forever concerned with young girlhood, her journalistic work included portraits on the emerging population of "teenagers." While this rising community struck many adults as tragic and foreign, Bowen strove to understand them. Her novels are evidence of her success.

Since The Death of the Heart, I have read both Bowen’s fictional letters and those she wrote in real life to Eudora Welty, Virginia Woolf, May Sarton, Charles Ritchie, and many others. She was a voracious letter writer and would easily send out a dozen before the lunch bell rang. Writing between the two world wars, Bowen lived through a time of enormous upheaval as gramophones, typewriters, and cinema rose in ubiquity. Not surprisingly, she often viewed the idea of immediate communication as a threat to privacy and society: "The motor car demolishes distances, and the telephone and wireless keep the house knit up, perhaps too much, with the world."

Wherever Bowen travelled, she contemplated the force of memory and the past. "In Rome I wondered how to break down the barrier between myself and happenings outside my memory. I was looking for splinters of actuality in a shifting mass of experience other than my own. Time is one kind of space; it creates distance." As I read her letters in the Berg Collection and hold the pages she once touched, I feel a similar collapse of distance between me and the writer I love. I embrace the honeyed corniness and romanticism of the whole scenario and, suddenly, Bowen feels present. Somewhere along her nearly-illegible cursive, I see both the vulnerability of Elizabeth Bowen, Portia, and myself.

I have kept a diary for fourteen years now and, maybe because I am less innocent or more “sophisticated,” "articulate," and "thoughtful," I no longer tear out pages that present me in an undesirable light. Other times, in a bout of inspiration, I will flip out my stationary, thumb through the drawer for stamps, and pen a few cards until my hand begins to cramp and my thoughts start to drift. At this point, I’ll pull out To the North, which features my favorite Bowen lady, Emmeline. She is the magnetic character Bowen believed every story required — the one with whom we’re supposed to fall in love. Needless to say, I fell.

Bowen’s young women "play in a foreign language of which they know not one word," all the while discouraged by laughably smug boys to "Lock everything up; hide everything! Don’t bat an eyelid ever." This faulty advice never works. Bowen’s guileless girls write as a way of becoming. Late one night, Portia cries about the adults who dictate her life, "They would forgive me if I were something special. But I don’t know what I was meant to be." I'm twenty-one now and with each passing day, I don't relate less to Portia, but more.

Jane Hu is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Montreal. This is her first appearance in these pages. She tumbls here and twitters here.

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